Trump breaks another campaign promise: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-escalates-war-with-news-media-cancels-meeting-with-new-york-times/2016/11/22/3b02f9ce-b0b1-11e6-840f-e3ebab6bcdd3_story.html?hpid=hp_rhp-top-table-main_transition-9a%3Ahomepage%2Fstory I'm glad to see he's not a to...

Not humorous, but "etc" and not sure if dark enough for Darker news thread: New 'brief' thread created ~~Felstaff BBC: German court acquits 'Sharia Police' in Wuppertal A German court has ruled that seven Muslim men who formed a Sharia street patrol did not break laws against political uni...

The Guardian: 'Extreme surveillance' becomes UK law with barely a whimper Wat this is scary stuff. Some highlights from the Guardian article: A bill giving the UK intelligence agencies and police the most sweeping surveillance powers in the western world has passed into law with barely a whimper, m...

Now that the comic subforum is a bit livelier than usual, allow me to introduce: Paranatural Paranatural is a weird and funny webcomic. The premise: Young Maxwell moves to small town called Mayview when his father decides he wants to run a seven-eleven in his old hometown, and oh boy, is he in for a...

Well discussion about this comic is moving on glacial scale even for xkcd fora standards, but ... that's just fine! It makes me cringe a bit to see him being a bigot. It's not surprising, since he is very hung up about the rules of his society. He is already undead but still insists on keeping t...

I can agree this is simply awesome. You can see the classic epic hero's journey, with the exactly right twists, in the works. The religo-mystical stuff hits just the right spots that got me excited when reading, say, Foucault's Pendulum.

At this point I'd like to remind that after Chapter 59 concluded with a thrilling cliff-hanger , we had once again our two-weeks-worth of Awesome Cool Pigeons, and we are now back with Chapter 60 . With webcomics and other serial fiction it's always hard to tell, but this might actually be a third a...

I was linked to this post that presents, let's say, curious viewpoint on Trump's racism and our (the left wing) reaction to it. The media (and others) are still crying wolf on Trump A couple excerpts to highlight the main points and blogger's main line of reasoning: 4. Aren’t there a lot of voters w...

Summary of Trump Transition disarray, by the courtesy of BBC . Summary speculation: Trump's son-in-law Kushner does not like Christie (because Christie was attorney general in 2004 when son-in-law's father was found of guilty of several charges shortly summarized as "corruption" in New Je...

I've never seen the anime, but this trailer doesn't really impress me. It seems a rather standard action sci-fi, with a lot of pg-rated porn, which is something I've always rather disliked. I'm not going to try to defend the pornographic side of it, but the original movie is a fantastic piece of cy...

2. Defense. Another traditionally republican area that has widespread appeal. And, in practice, Democrat leadership bombs stuff too. So, actual differences in actions might be relatively small. Just need to vocally support bombing far off places a lot more. That and throw some dollars at military b...

BBC: US President-elect Donald Trump has said he will deport or jail up to three million illegal migrants initially. Those targeted would be migrants with criminal records, such as gang members and drug dealers, he told US broadcaster CBS in an interview. He also confirmed that another election pro...

NYTimes on Trump transition team , they also have list of possible candidates for cabinet positions , but most of this seems to be rumors, not hard facts. However: One of the influences on Mr. Trump could come from an unlikely quarter: President Obama. Meeting in the Oval Office on Thursday, Mr. Tr...

NYTimes: Vice President-Elect Pence to Take Over Trump Transition Effort Pence replaces Chris Christie. I just realized that I was in full kremlnology mode reading the headline, trying to infer if this means anything. Couldn't come up with anything. edit. Also missed that Peter Thiel has been named...

Turkey arrests the leaders and all 11 MPs of Kurdish parliament party HDP. BBC.

Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Whatsapp were reported to be inaccessible inside Turkey shortly after the detentions, even when users tried to circumvent restrictions using a virtual private network (VPN).

Some places need to be run by skullcrackers... WTF? I don't know if this is what CU was alluding to, but there's a theory that societies need to be run by brutal but fair, rule-of-law-abiding skullcrackers for a sufficient amount of time before you have reached a societal equilibrium point of &quot...

Does xkcd fora have weird butterfly effects? Or collective latent pre-cog abilities? A couple of posts in a weeks old thread yesterday, and now: Bob Dylan: Nobel Literature Prize left me speechless US singer-songwriter Bob Dylan says he accepts his Nobel Prize in literature, ending a silence since b...

What is Aleppo? To be fair, that's just being uninformed. Is being uninformed on foreign policy dumb? Sure, if you want to be the president of the US. (It would be also dumb to believe that you could be a serious contender from a third party in the US presidential race, barring some very special ci...

Mr. Dylan is yet to comment on his award. According to some reports I saw (sorry, not in English) this is also already remarkable: no winner has been totally silent for a full day in recent times. Not only to press, but to the Nobel committee has not been in contact with him.

NYTimes Official press release The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2016 is awarded to Bob Dylan “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition". Eh, urm, congratulations? This is the first time the prize goes to a musician for song lyrics. I don't know if we ...

I must say that the discussion that extensively draws parallels to Hitler does not strike terribly grounded in reality, like others have already pointed out, unless you have SA and communists directly fighting for the control of streets and cracking skulls. Please do criticize Trump for his faults, ...

Financial Times The Verge BBC Soundcloud’s biggest strength is the community of creators who built it, with an extensive catalogue of music, such as mixes, hip hop, EDM and DJ sets. Independent digital music companies are flailing, despite music revenues growing for the first time in nearly two dec...

BBC continues to surprise: now they are doing anime reporting (with annoyingly click-baity titles and numbered paragraphs)? Why the story of body-swapping teenagers has gripped Japan A Japanese film has made history by becoming the first animation not made by the legendary Studio Ghibli to rake in m...

Welp so I found about that this is a thing just a moment ago. Starring Scarlett Johansson as The Major. According to IMDB / Wikipedia , other casting choices are combination of Western and Asian actors. Apparently the rest of the Section 9: Pilou Asbæk as Batou, Takeshi Kitano as Aramaki, China Han...

One obvious point is that any depiction of a biblical story done by people from the Western cultural background will count as done by insiders to the foreseeable future. Now, I don't actually agree that we should not be allowed to touch other cultures' religious myths and other fiction if some creat...

It's not that I feel books were better before either. When I was a kid and teenager they were new to me sure. They presented me with new concepts and ideas that still echo through my actions and work, which in itself is quite fascinating to realize and trace back to its origins. But it wasn't like ...